What are New Yorkers Thinking About?

In Mr NYC's never ending quest to keep its cyber-finger on the metaphorical pulse of this city, I think the news events of today are a perfect example of how New York is a never ending melange of highs, lows, worries, and revelations. Every day, various emotions and thoughts mingle and diverge and course through our hearts, brains, and souls making us alternatively happy, sad, nervous, and sometimes just saying "What?" To wit:

A Key for ‘Captain Cool’ and the 1549 Crew The triumph of the human spirit. Who knew anything so beautiful could literally come out of the Hudson River?

Rodriguez Admits Using Drug to Enhance Performance A-Rod's been a naughty boy. Needless to say, he's gonna have to go through the public apology, public redemption routine. Ugh.

Freakoutonomics This is how the recession is eating away at our city's economic, "death by a thousand cutbacks" as the article says.

A One-Man Immigration Protest on 72nd Street Huh?

New York on the Move

When Diners Pick Up Stakes, and Vintage New York Is Lost

It's not just New Yorkers who are leaving town -- the city itself is literally being exported.

Remember the Moondance Diner? It used to be on 6th Avenue and Grand Street until last year it was sold off and hauled out to La Barge, Wyoming (I actually blogged extensively extensively about this in 2007).

Now another diner, the Cheyenne on Ninth Avenue and 33rd street, is moving to Alabama! And the same folks who are buying and moving it now want to buy a closed movie theater in Queens! On top of that, the guy who used to run the now defunct Kim's Video Stores has sold off his entire collection to someone in Sicily. And that's not the end of it.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. London Bridge was torn down and re-assembled in Arizona. The Cloisters here in NYC are made up of several old cathedrals and buildings from France. The Temple of Dendur at the Met was excavated in Egypt and rebuilt here. And if art collections, furniture, and other precious assets can be moved from place to place, why not real estate? So this is really nothing new.

I guess we can look at all of this as a kind of cultural exchange. If NYC has nothing else, its got a great culture. If people around the country and around the world want a piece of it, and can pay for it, who 's to blame them? But like our middle class, let's just try to preserve as much of it here as we can so that we continue to have a great culture. Let's hope it's not all for sale.

The Middle Class in NYC ...

... is shrinking.

Big surprise.

I often kvetch on this blog about how this city is becoming less and less friendly to the common folk and their quality of life. Now there are numbers to prove it.

In the last couple of years, more than 150,000 people -- the size of many cities in this country -- have fled NYC because they couldn't afford it. According to the Center for an Urban Future, New Yorkers need to earn six figures a year in order to hack out a middle class life. It costs twice as much, and requires you earn twice as much, to live a comfortable life in NYC than it does in most other cities in America.

Well, I guess this isn't really news. Still, it's good to know about it. New York has always been expensive. It's a great, great city, and people are attracted by its greatness. Please from all over the world want to live here and are willing to pay astronomical sums for the honor. Those who can afford NYC crowd out those who cannot. Supply and demand, zero-sum gain, capitalism at its finest. I just hope that as this city gets ever richer and richer, it doesn't lose those wonderful qualities and textures that make it such a desirable place to live in the first place. Then what'll be the point?

For more advice on how to live in NYC, go to Apartment Therapy.com. It gives great advice about how to make small living spaces more bearable.

Carnegie Deli(cious)

Milton Parker, Carnegie Deli Partner, Dies at 90

Thanks for all the great eats Milton!

Your sandwiches are the best.

You will be missed.

"Securing the City"

While Presidents boast about "keeping us safe" and "wars on terror", the real heroes of our national security are the cops and law enforcement officials in the fray of battle. They're the ones who thwart terrorism before it ever happens, who keep their eyes out for the bad guys, and it's a hard, nearly impossible job.

A newly published book called Securing the City by Christopher Dickey is about the NYPD after 9/11. The hero of this book is Ray Kelly, our city's current Police Commissioner, who revolutionized the police department to fight terrorism. Law enforcement tactics of the past aren't enough, as Kelly clearly realized.

Today's NYPD is not just cops on the beat and Swat teams -- it's a hyper-modern, technologically-sophisticated intelligence gathering machine that works 24/7. Like the CIA, it has agents all over the world, sniffing out threats to NYC. Wherever, whenever a terrorist hits around the world, the NYPD goes there to investigate and see how a similar act could be carried out in New York. As the saying goes, terrorists around the world are obsessed with hitting New York City -- and always will be. But, if Dickey is right, NYC is better prepared for it than ever before.

Most scarily, a lot of terrorists were and are inspired to attacked NYC because of movies from the 1990s like Independence Day and Godzilla which included lots of wholesale destruction of this city. I guess the arguments that violence in the media causes violence in reality hold some merit -- in ways we never imagined.

Nice guys finish ... if they become bad

If you ever wanted proof that chicks in this town dig "bad boys" and not "nice guys," you gotta read this brilliant column in today's New York Press. It shows you what a Darwinian adventure the mating game in NYC is, and that the thing women are most attracted to is strength. Being "nice" or "considerate" or "sweet" gets guys nowhere with New York women. Our women are tough, tough broads, and you better be tough if you wanna score with them. Like all New Yorkers, our dames don't have patience for wasting time or indecisiveness. You better step up ... or get outta their way.

Breadlines and Champagne at Film Forum

Great art thrives in tough times, and one of the golden eras of Hollywood cinema was the 1930s.

From February 6 to March 5, Film Forum down in the Village is presenting some the classics of the Great Depression including It Happened One Night, Little Ceasar, American Madness, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, and the original Scarface and King Kong.

Dubbed Breadlines and Champagne, these movies encapsulate not only the hardships of that era but also some of the escapism that Americans enjoyed at that time.

Some of these films, like Baby Face with a young and hot Barbara Stanwyck, are quite naughty and racy. It came out in 1933 before the whole Hayes Code/Catholic League thing made American movies rather vanilla for the next thirty-something years. Five extra sordid minutes of Baby Face footage were discovered in 2005!

And the current Mayor has a bad day ...

Reclusive Staten Island Groundhog Bites Mayor

Apparently the rogue groundhog took a hunk out of the Mayor's finger. Bet he'd give a couple hundred million to get that hunk back. Lucky for him, the groundhog doesn't have rabies although I'm sure the Mayor's people are going to try to have it killed.

Feel better Mike.

Interview with Fiorello La Guardia, Fusion Candidate for Mayor, 1933

Where's NYC Going?

New Yorkers have only one thing on their mind -- money. Well, money and real estate (and real estate is basically just money in tactile form).

It's a given that the current financial crises and resulting scandals are wrecking havoc on the finance and real estate industries in this town, two of the underpinnings of the NYC economy. But how is this actually affecting the lives of New Yorkers, rich and poor?

Two new magazine articles examine this impact in depth. Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair article looks at how the Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme has shaken Upper East Side society and the city's upper crust. While no one is going to feel overly sorry for this crowd, this scandal is more than just about lost money: it's about how a whole sub-cultural has been forced to look at itself and not liking what it sees. Also, this week's New York magazine has an article by Gabriel Sherman about Tishman Speyer's 2006 acquisition of Stuyvesant Town, and how it's attempt to turn this working class bastion of city life into the latest Yuppie enclave has been a debacle.

We are living through a turning point in New York City history, in some ways even bigger thaan 9/11. The current economic situation is forcing New York to make hard choices about its priorities. The many industries that fuel this city's economy are changing -- permanently. Crain's New York Business is hosting a conference tomorrow called "The Future of New York City." Mayor Bloomberg and several of the big mucky-mucks in this town will be there trying to figure it out. What's they'll conclude, I have no idea but let's hope they can come up with some good ideas to keep this the #1 city in the world.

You can listen to live coverage of it tomorrow on WNYC 93.9 FM/820 AM Brian Lehrer show.